Lisa Loomer

It's hard to watch a grown man cry. Especially if he's 6 feet 9 and a living legend. However, Earvin "Magic" Johnson lost his famous cool before more than 1,000 guests at the dinner for corporate sponsors preceding the 15th annual A Midsummer Night's Magic Mardi Gras gala on Saturday night at Paramount Studios.

Greetings, Earthling. Welcome to Los Angeles, city of the angles (sorry, "angels"), where a decent map and a rented Geo can get you extremely lost, but also can convey you to a larger, farther-flung and more diverse collection of theater stages than any political convention attendee could possibly visit in one . . . visit. I'll feign honesty at this point.

Although Oskar Eustis left his job as associate artistic director of the Taper recently to become artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., he certainly hasn't forgotten his L.A. friends. The next Trinity season looks like the Trinity has become the Taper-on-the-Narragansett.

It's one of the oldest and loftiest functions the theater has, serving as a forum for the social issues of the day. But ask many American theater artists if their work is political, and they'll squirm to avoid the scarlet letter P. That's what happened during panel discussions at last summer's Ojai Theater Festival. "We had two public talks about political theater," recalls playwright-screenwriter Lisa Loomer, one of the participants.

TELEVISION Without a Trace: The cable cult hit "Mystery Science Theater 3000" got a reprieve when the Sci-Fi Channel ordered 13 new episodes after the show was dropped by Comedy Central. But now it faces a new crisis: the loss of actor Trace Beaulieu, who is leaving after seven seasons of playing the mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, and working the Crow T. Robot puppet. "MST3K," as fans know it, features a space-stranded human and his homemade robots making fun of cheesy movies that Dr.

"He's getting to be a real man--he bribes everybody." The line is a quote from Lisa Loomer's "Birds," the first play to come out of South Coast Repertory's Hispanic Playwrights' Project last July and receive a full production on its Second Stage. "Birds" is a collage in abstract time of the bicultural Los Angeles Vasquez family. Its leading characters--mother Lilly and father Manny--are transplanted Mexicans who adjust (he) and maladjust (she) to the new culture.

The first signs of a possible new mid-size theater company in Santa Monica have emerged, with at least one big name attached to the idea: Dustin Hoffman. If all goes as planned, the company will operate out of a new 500-seat theater on Santa Monica College's Madison campus, the site of a former elementary school that will be converted into a performing arts center for the college, on the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard between 10th and 11th Streets.